RENTAL12

Background

When Kristina Zotova arrived in Sardinia, she did what most travellers do: she started exploring accommodation options. What she found was a gap. Hotels along the north-east coast—Olbia, Golfo Aranci, the Gulf of Olbia—were priced out of reach for most visitors. The vacation rentals on offer were functional at best: generic furniture, no sense of place, hosts who felt invisible.

"There was an obvious gap," Kristina explains, "and nobody was filling it with any real design sensibility. So in 2021 we launched RENTAL12 to be that missing option: design-led vacation homes, owner-operated from the ground up, at a price point that makes sense."

Together with co-founder Panvini Rosati, Kristina started RENTAL12 with a simple but ambitious premise: hospitality as craft, not a commodity. The result was a collection of houses, apartments and villas across the Gulf of Olbia and Golfo Aranci, each furnished with the exclusive AZULIS design collection created by RENTAL12's Design Director Anastasia Duke.

Five years later, RENTAL12 manages 37 properties, is growing its direct booking share toward 20%, and in 2026 became the only Italian finalist shortlisted in two categories at The Shortyz Awards: Best Interior Design and the Guest Experience Award.

Challenge

When RENTAL12 launched in 2021 with a handful of apartments, the early path looked familiar: list on Airbnb and Booking.com, let the platforms do the heavy lifting, and focus on building something worth staying in. It worked to get the business off the ground. But the trade-offs became obvious quickly.

"We were paying heavy commissions, we had no direct relationship with guests, and the OTAs were telling our story for us instead of us telling it," Kristina recalls.

There was a deeper problem, too. Kristina and Floriana—who were now serving as RENTAL12's COO and CEO, respectively—had a vision that went well beyond a few listings, but almost every platform they evaluated made scaling prohibitively expensive. Per-booking commissions meant costs grew faster than the business. Others were built for staying small, with no real path to the kind of operation they had in mind.

"The hardest part wasn't the operations," Kristina explains. "It was finding a platform that could actually grow with us without eating our margin alive. We needed something simple enough to launch a single apartment on, but powerful enough to carry us to 37 properties and beyond, while keeping the economics sane as we built our direct booking brand."

What they were looking for was a foundation: flat pricing, a proper website builder, reliable channel and calendar sync, and enough flexibility to layer their own design identity and guest experience on top. The search brought them to Lodgify.

Solution

Kristina found Lodgify the way she made most early decisions: carefully. She spent weeks comparing platforms, reading documentation, and—crucially—reviewing testimonials from real operators who had been using the tools for years.

"Stories exactly like the one I'm telling right now," she says, "written by people running real businesses, not polished case studies from sales pages. Lodgify kept coming up in the comparisons that mattered: flat pricing instead of per-booking commission, a proper website builder, real channel management."

RENTAL12 has been on Lodgify since day one, and three things in particular have shaped the way they use it.

A platform that scales without friction

Every one of RENTAL12's 37 properties has been onboarded through Lodgify. "We could set up a new property in an afternoon, not a week, which mattered enormously when we were going from three apartments to thirty-plus," Kristina explains. 

With one calendar, one inbox, and one channel manager in sync, the team—still small and owner-operated—has been able to grow without the kind of operational overhead that would otherwise require a much larger headcount.

A real brand home, built fast

Before launching rental12.com, the OTAs were defining RENTAL12's story. The Lodgify website builder changed that. 

"We went from zero online presence to a working, beautiful website in a matter of days, not months," says Kristina. "For a small team with no dedicated developer, that was transformational. Lodgify gave us a real brand home at a point when most of our competitors were still pointing guests at their Airbnb profile." 

Today, rental12.com is the anchor of a full SEO and content strategy, and RENTAL12 is pushing its direct booking share toward 20% of total reservations.

Support that actually helps

For a lean, owner-operated team managing dozens of properties, the moments when something doesn't work as expected matter. "Whenever we've hit something tricky, the response has been fast, human, and actually useful," says Kristina. "Not scripted, not deflecting. People who know the product and want you to succeed on it."

Results

RENTAL12's growth from 3 apartments in 2021 to 37 properties in 2026 tells one part of the story. The other part is how they grew: without sacrificing the design quality or guest experience that defines the brand, and without the kind of operational chaos that usually comes with rapid scaling.

"We run 37 properties with a small, owner-operated team, and Lodgify is the reason that's even possible," Kristina says. "What used to take hours now takes minutes, which means we spend our time on the guest experience and the design work instead of admin."

Direct bookings have become a meaningful and growing share of the business. RENTAL12's direct booking rate has climbed to around 14% of total reservations—up from single digits just a few years ago—with 2026 expected to push that figure close to 20%. "Every direct booking we win goes straight to our margin instead of commission," Kristina notes, "and more importantly, it means the guest came to us because of the RENTAL12 brand, not because we happened to show up in a generic search on Airbnb."

The Shortyz Awards recognition in 2026—shortlisted for both Best Interior Design and the Guest Experience Award—is perhaps the clearest external signal of what the team has built: a vacation rental company that competes at an international level, from a small city on the Sardinian coast.

"It's not just a software stack for us," says Kristina. "It's part of the reason RENTAL12 is where it is today."

Kristina's advice

Building a design-led vacation rental business from scratch—in a market that wasn't ready for it, during a period that tested every operator in the industry—has given Kristina a clear perspective on what actually matters.

Her advice to new hosts:

"Start with one property and make it exceptional. Don't scale until your first home is genuinely best-in-class. Reviews compound, and your first ten define the next hundred."

On OTA dependency: "Own your brand from day one. OTAs are a starting point, not a strategy. Build your own website, your own guest list, your own story. Every direct booking is worth three on Airbnb."

On design: "Invest in design, not decoration. Guests remember how a space made them feel. Spend on the things they actually touch: beds, linens, lighting, kitchenware."

On technology: "Pick your tech stack carefully, then commit. We've run on Lodgify since day one and never regretted it. A simple, reliable backbone lets you focus on the guest, not the software."

And on the noise that surrounds the industry: "Ignore the YouTube gurus, the TikTok courses, and most of what 'industry experts' are selling. You know your market better than they do. Trust your instinct. Move with conviction."

You can learn more about RENTAL12 by visiting their website at rental12.com.